On a lively jaunt to Half Price Books in Robinson Township, PA, I found a delightful gem. It’s a book of poetry by metaphysical giant George Herbert called The Temple. As far as I can tell he’s not Catholic, but his poetry can definitely be interpreted through a Catholic lens (I believe he was an Anglican minister). I’ve only read a few of the poems, because they’re a little heavy for casual reading. The focus of the book is on his sermons to his congregation, and they all deal with the Church, the sacraments, and salvation. Appropriate. Here’s one I thought I’d share:

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with tears:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

I particularly like the way he lays out the poem visually in the shape of an altar. Some people take issue with that, saying it’s unecessary, but I think it’s appropriate here. I’ll probably post more of his work as I read through the book. Have a great holiday!

Ok, it has been a long time, I know, but I finally have something to post. This is a paper I wrote for my Creative Writing class about my instructor Dr. David Craig’s book of poetry - The Hive of the Saints. I only used one poem out of the book, mostly because I was lazy, but he ended up liking it so it worked out. Enjoy!

———————————————————–

In his poem “California,” from the collection of poems entitled The Hive of the Saints, Dr. David Craig suggests that life on earth is ephemeral: it is impossible to find our true home among men, and therefore we are made for a far better home elsewhere. With a vision that is both introspective and incredibly perceptive he illustrates that the places we miss and the homes we long for are illusory and only once we leave that place do we conjure up the feelings we come to associate with it. The truth is that, while we are in these places, we find ourselves again wishing we were somewhere else. These realizations serve to bring us to his main point – that our true home is not on this earth, but in the afterlife.

Craig begins his poem with a reflection on the speaker’s time in Goletta, California with its “low-tide winter beach[es],” and its “wet-suited surfers” (Craig 87). His words carry a heavy sense of melancholy as he talks about his friends Craig and Gary, how they vied with each other for the honor of making the best screw, living a sort of “manufactured madness”, while hoping for a “holiness which might transform them” (87). In these two characters Craig gives us humanity. It is indicative of the human condition to live monotonously, to desire something more, and in the end to settle “for a kind of show” (87). Too often we settle for what we can get here and now, and forget that our fulfillment waits for us on the other side of death.

The speaker seems to sense this calling to something more and is restless, eventually leaving his mediocre friends for yet another place to call home: Queen Mary, California. And yet he finds himself uneasy still: “[A] place no more my own than home,/ than all the people there I never spoke to,/ than what moved me through those places” (87). What is it that moves him through these places? It is a desire for a peace which nothing on this earth can give. We are all “too far from home” (87). After telling us that his friend Craig had killed himself years later, the speaker flatly states that California was always “other” for him (88). By “other” he means that California was always something other than what he was searching for, something abstract and distant.

In light of this tireless search for peace he asks himself: What is home? Craig affirms, “[T]here’s no fiction like home–” (88), putting clever spin on the words of Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. He uses the word “fiction” to state even more clearly that there is no such place as that memory we consider home. He goes on further to say:

Still, I’d give a lot to be back there:
in Cleveland, near those friends who were never
as close or real as I would have liked,
near the memories we never shared, the places
that didn’t exist (88).

In this passage Craig reminds himself that what he misses is an illusion: a quaint mental image conjured to provide a sense of comfort. He looks to the familiar for contentment, realizing that he has idealized it and yet at the same time refusing to let it go. And when all is said and done, the comfort it provides is passing and the speaker finds himself still yearning for a place to call home.

To express this desire, Craig tenderly paints us a vivid picture of Lake Erie, “vast in steel blue or grey” and of “evening’s huge orange sun/ beginning to settle down, squeezing/ between blue clouds,/ and to the left, tinted skyline” (88). The speaker remembers his home in its most ideal setting, as an artist remembers a scene when he begins to paint. He draws out the best colors and composes his work from the most appealing angle, creating something exquisite from the ordinary. If only life were a painting, and those scenes that we treasure were frozen in acrylics or oils.

At the end of his poem, Craig begins to ask more explicitly the question which has been underlying the entire poem – are we really at home here? As we look back we find ourselves wishing that those places we love had never been left behind, and we long for the feelings we imagine we had when we were there. To this Craig poses the question: “Do we ever really like the places where we live/ when we’re there?” (89). Is it possible to be truly content here? Craig gives us our answer. “For a while maybe,/” he says, “but then the wishing starts all over again…” (89).

After all his introspection the speaker comes to the gradual realization that he can never find complete peace in either California or Cleveland because there can be no home for him here and moreover he will never find one. “In most traditions, this is called a grace,” he says, referring to the Christian belief that we are meant for life in heaven (89). It is a sort of blessing to be as restless as we are, for it is indicative of our ultimate purpose and the true reason for our creation, which is to dwell in the presence of God forever.

by Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

At the foot of the Cross on Calvary
Three soldiers sat and diced,
And one of them was the Devil
And he won the Robe of Christ.

When the Devil comes in his proper form
To the chamber where I dwell,
I know him and make the Sign of the Cross
Which drives him back to Hell.

And when he comes like a friendly man
And puts his hand in mine,
The fervour in his voice is not
From love or joy or wine.

And when he comes like a woman,
With lovely, smiling eyes,
Black dreams float over his golden head
Like a swarm of carrion flies.

Now many a million tortured souls
In his red halls there be:
Why does he spend his subtle craft
In hunting after me?

Kings, queens and crested warriors
Whose memory rings through time,
These are his prey, and what to him
Is this poor man of rhyme,

That he, with such laborious skill,
Should change from role to role,
Should daily act so many a part
To get my little soul?

Oh, he can be the forest,
And he can be the sun,
Or a buttercup, or an hour of rest
When the weary day is done.

I saw him through a thousand veils,
And has not this sufficed?
Now, must I look on the Devil robed
In the radiant Robe of Christ?

He comes, and his face is sad and mild,
With thorns his head is crowned;
There are great bleeding wounds in his feet,
And in each hand a wound.

How can I tell, who am a fool,
If this be Christ or no?
Those bleeding hands outstretched to me!
Those eyes that love me so!

I see the Robe — I look — I hope –
I fear — but there is one
Who will direct my troubled mind;
Christ’s Mother knows her Son.

O Mother of Good Counsel, lend
Intelligence to me!
Encompass me with wisdom,
Thou Tower of Ivory!

“This is the Man of Lies,” she says,
“Disguised with fearful art:
He has the wounded hands and feet,
But not the wounded heart.”

Beside the Cross on Calvary
She watched them as they diced.
She saw the Devil join the game
And win the Robe of Christ.

Joyce Kilmer, The Robe of Christ, in Regis Martin, Garlands of Grace: An Anthology of Great Christian Poetry, (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2001) 90-92.

My sister, Kathryn of Something Like This, has been getting involved with a movement called LibriVox where volunteers read sections from (or whole) books in the public domain (meaning their copyright licenses have expired - e.g. Count of Monte Cristo, Poems by Robert Frost, etc.) Here’s an excerpt from their site:

Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Anyone can volunteer to read something. It’s an interesting idea, I think, and Kathryn has been reading several chapters and excerpts for them. I thought it would be cool to put them up here too. Here are a few of the things she’s read, and you can go to her site to listen to the rest of them:

• Romantic Poetry Collection 001
  To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet
• The Lilac Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, Editor
  The False Prince and the True
  The Hoodie-Crow
• Legend Land volumes 1 & 2
  The Women Soldiers of Fishguard

Enjoy!

Taken from Phatcatholic Apologetics:

Adam Janke, a friend of mine and webmaster of Catechetics Online, is hoping to form an online group to read and discuss Balthasar’s great “Trilogy” of theological works on God and man. Here are the details:

We are now forming a group which will read and discuss the “Trilogy” (16 volumes) of the man who has been considered the greatest theologian since Karl Barth and the premier theologian of the 20th century. Since most of us are busy our reading plan will cover either 4 or 5 years. It will be conducted over the Internet on either a dedicated forum just for this purpose or through an email group. If you know anyone that might be interested in this reading group, please pass the word along and have them email me. We are hoping to get together at least 10 people who are interested in the reading group, and at least a couple of people who are familiar with Balthasar’s thought and can help guide us. We want to start sometime in the next month. For more information on what we will be reading, I have included a summary of each book:

Part I: The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics
Probably the most important sustained piece of theological writing to appear since Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, von Balthasar’s work restores aesthetics and contemplation to their rightful place in Christian theology. Armed with a remarkable knowledge of the theological and metaphysical traditions as well as of Western letters, von Balthasar shows how the Biblical vision of the divine glory, revealed in the crucified and risen Christ and reflected in the great theologies of the Christian tradition, fulfills and transcends the perception of Being in Western Metaphysics.

Volume I - Seeing The Form
The work opens with a critical review of developments in Protestant and Catholic Theology since the Reformation which have led to the steady neglect of aesthetics in Christian theology. From here, von Balthasar turns to the central theme of the volume: the question of theological knowledge. He re-examines the nature of Christian believing (here he draws widely on such theological figures as Anselm, Pascal, and Newman) which gives due place to the particular kind of ‘knowing’ which develops within the personal relationship of the believer to the God mediated through the revelation-form of Jesus Christ.

Volume II - Clerical Styles
What von Balthasar offers here is a typology of the relationship between beauty and revelation which shows that there neither has been nor could be any truly great and historically fruitful theology which was not expressly conceived and born under the constellation of beauty and grace. This volume specifically offers a series of studies of representative figures from the earlier period of Christian theology - Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm and Bonaventure.

Volume III - Lay Styles
This volume specifically offers a series of representative figures from the later period of Christian theology - Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Hamann, Soloviev, Hopkins and Peguy.

Volume IV - The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity
This fourth volume considers the metaphysical tradition of the contemplation of Being. He provides major studies of Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Plato and Plotinus and the development of this tradition in the Middle Ages. He then explores the analogy between the metaphysical vision of Being and the Christian vision of the divine glory of the Trinity.

Volume V - The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age
This volume presents a series of studies of representative mystics, theologians, philosophers and poets and explores the three main streams of metaphysics which have developed since the catastrophe of Nominalism. the way of self-abandonment to the divine glory is traced through figures like Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius, de Sales; the attempt to relocate theology and beauty through figures like Nicholas of Cusa, Holderlin, Goethe, Heidegger; the metaphysics of spirit through Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Idealists. The strengths and weaknesses of these ways are relentlessly exposed. This volume ends with the search for the Christian contribution to metaphysics.

Volume VI - Theology: The Old Covenant
This volume initiates von Balthasar’s study of the biblical vision and understanding of God’s glory. Starting with the theophanies of the Patriarchal period, it shows how such glory is most fully expressed in the graciousness of the Covenant relationship between God and Israel. But the breaking of that relationship by Israel means that in the later books of the Old testament, the divine glory is seen in God’s willingness to bear with his people in the dark side of their history. There is no final version of God’s glory in the Old Testament. In the 500 years before Christ the Covenant relation is more idea than reality. The vision of the transcendent glory of God which is developed in the later writings, is only fragmentary. It will find its strange and unexpected fulfillment in the new Covenant.

Volume VII - Theology: The New Covenant
In this final volume of part one, von Balthasar reflects on the New Testament vision of God’s revelation of his glory in Christ. This divine ‘appearing’ is grounded in the self-emptying of the eternal logos in the incarnation, cross and descent into hell. Christ is the man who represents God and is also God; he is a symbol of the world and is also the world. He dies, but in dying rises into the eternal life of God. It is in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection that the Christian vision is truly expressed and the joining of God and the world in the new and eternal covenant is realized.

Part II: Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory
Here it is “the good” which provides the key. Here being as splendid, to be contemplated (beauty) now appears as the goal of our striving (the good). Von Balthasar maintains that it is in the theatre that “man attempts a kind of transcendence endeavoring both to observe and to judge his own truth, in virtue of a transformation…by which he tries to gain clarity about himself”. Von Balthasar sees the phenomenon of theatre, the sheer fact that there is such a thing as structured performance, as a virtually untapped source of fruitfulness for theological reflection. His aim will be “to show how theology underlies it all, how all the elements of the drama can be rendered fruitful for theology.”

Volume I - Prolegomena
In this volume von Balthasar shows how many of the trends of modern theology point to an understanding of human and cosmic reality as divine drama. He will then consider objections to such theological dramatic theory and also the relationship between the Church and the theatre. This volume assembles the materials and the themes that will make it possible in subsequent volumes to develop this theological dramatic theory.

Volume II - Dramatis Personae: Man in God
Where the first volume surveyed the great world dramatists to gather concepts and ideas to apply to the real stage, which is the universe God has made and entered into himself as an actor. This volume describes the actors, the dramatis personae. This is his theological anthropology concerning man, his freedom and destiny in light of the biblical revelation. Von Balthasar is concerned here with the dramatic character of existence as a whole, approaching the topic through a consideration of the various conditions and situations of mankind as a drama that involves both the Creator and his creature.

Volume III - Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ
This is considered the most central book of the entire trilogy. It contains von Balthasar’s synthetic treatment of the central mysteries of the Catholic Faith: Christ, Mary, the Church, man and the Trinity.

Volume IV - The Action
Von Balthasar now turns to the action of the divine drama itself. Here we find his soteriology, where time, freedom, history, power, sin, conflict are seen in the light of the Cross, the culmination of the action and passion of God and man. “Here we discern the unity of ‘glory’ and the ‘dramatic’. God’s glory, as it appears in the world- supremely in Christ- is not something static that could be observed by a neutral investigator. It manifests itself only through the personal involvement whereby God himself comes forth to do battle and is both victor and vanquished. If this glory is to come within our range at all, an analogous initiative is called for on our part. Revelation is a battlefield. Those who do battle on it can only be believers and theologians, provided they have equipped themselves with the whole armor of God.”

Volume V - The Last Act
This volume is trinitarian, focusing on the mystery of God. He draws heavily on scripture and many passages from the works of the mystic Adrienne von Spyer. Some of the topics covered include “A Christian Eschatology”, “The World is from the Trinity”, “Earth Moves Heavenward”, “The Final Act: A Trinitarian Drama.”

Part III: Theo-Logic
Theo-logic is the crowning part of the great trilogy of the masterwork of von Balthasar. Theo-logic is a variation in theology, is being about not so much what man says about God, but what God speaks about himself. Balthasar does not address the truth about God until he first reflects on the beauty of God (The Glory of the Lord). Then he follows with his reflections on the great drama of our salvation and the goodness and mercy of the God who saves us (Theo-Drama). Now, in this work, he is ready to reflect on the truth that God reveals about himself, which is not something abstract or theoretical, but rather concrete and mysterious richness of God’s being as a personal and loving God.

Volume I - The Truth of the World

Explored in this volume are the topics:

• Truth as Nature
• Truth as Freedom
• Truth as Mystery
• Truth as Participation

Volume II - The Truth of God

Topics include:

• Divine and Human Logic
• The Possibility of Christology
• Logos and Logic in God
• Kata-logical Aspects
• The Word Was Made Flesh

Volume III - The Spirit of Truth

Topics Include:

• The Holy Spirit as Person
• The Father’s Two Hands
• The Role of the Spirit in the Work of Salvation
• The Spirit and the Church
• Spirit and World
• Upward and Onward to the Father!

Epilogue
A summary of the whole series divided into the following aptly named sections: Forecourt, Threshold, and Cathedral.

Adam also provided the following short bio on Balthasar:

About Hans Urs von Balthasar
Born in Lucerne in 1905, after studying at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Zurich von Balthasar completed a Ph.d. at Zurich in 1929 and continued his theological and philosophical studies in Munich, Lyon and Basel. He has won several academic prizes and has been awarded honorary doctorates at Edinburgh, Munster and Fribourg universities and the Catholic University of America. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he was also a Foreign Associate of the Institut de France. He died in July, 1988

If you are interested in joining this group, email Adam at:

• adam4jmj at gmail dot com

I’d join it myself if I had the time, but my boyfriend Nick will be doing it so I’ll end up hearing about it all anyway. It’s going to be sweet, nonetheless.

February

The winter moon has such a quiet car
That all the winter nights are dumb with rest.
She drives the gradual dark with drooping crest,
And dreams go wandering from her drowsy star.
Because the nights are silent, do not wake:
But there shall tremble through the general earth,
And over you, a quickening and a birth.
The sun is near the hill-tops for your sake.

The latest born of all the days shall creep
To kiss the tender eyelids of the year;
And you shall wake, grown young with perfect sleep,
And smile at the new world, and make it dear
With living murmurs more than dreams are deep.
Silence is dead, my Dawn; the morning’s here.

- Hilaire Belloc

It’s pretty sad that this post is pretty much the same thing as the last one, but things have been crazy around here, and they’re only going to get crazier. I’ve just been trying to stay on top of things (most specifically Latin). But I will try to update more once break starts and I’ll try to keep it up into spring semester. Until then I’m afraid my posts will have to remain sporatic. So here’s another sonnet. Enjoy!

December

Hoar Time about the house betakes him slow,
Seeking an entry for his weariness.
And in that dreadful company distress
And the sad night with silent footsteps go.
On my poor fire the brands are scarce aglow,
And in the woods without what memories press
Where, waning in the trees from less to less,
Mysterious bangs the honeyed moon and low.

For now December, full of aged care,
Comes in upon the year and weakly grieves;
Mumbling his lost desires and his despair;
And with mad trembling hand still interweaves,
The dank sear flower-stalks tangled in his hair,
While round about him whirl the rotten leaves.

- Hilaire Belloc

I found this at the Catholic Defense Directory and thought “Woah, cool!”…Literally.

October

Look, how those steep woods on the mountain’s face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year’s grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,

And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I’ll stretch and steaming beast I’ll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

- Hilaire Belloc